Sacrilege were a female-fronted thrash metal band from the Midlands region of England. Despite having played relatively few gigs during their existence, Sacrilege are today recognised as an important band; both as an influence on later heavy metal and doom metal bands, and as an example of the blending of hardcore punk, radical politics, and heavy metal that occurred during the 1980s, making Sacrilege one of the prototypical crust punk bands of the time.

Prior to the formation of Sacrilege, guitarist Damian Thompson,drummer Andy Baker released a pair of thrash metal demos under the moniker Warwound. In 1983, the duo joined the Varukers, Damian left the Varukers in 1984 to form Sacrilege. In 1984 and ’85, the band recorded demos and contributed tracks to the compilations We Won’t Be Your Fucking Poor (Mortarhate, 1985) and Anglican Scrape Attic (a pre-Earache release from Digby Pearson)

After replacing drummer Pickering with Andrew Baker, Sacrilege recorded their first album, Behind the Realms of Madness, in 1985, which was released through the Bristol-based label Children of the Revolution (COR) Records. The album was moderately successful, selling a respectable 7000 copies. Shortly after this, the band brought in former Warhammer member Mitch Dickinson on second guitar, although he never played live with the band and he soon left to join hardcore group Heresy and later Unseen Terror. Around this time, the band were approached by FM Revolver Records, but this ultimately went nowhere.

Their second release, Within the Prophecy, was recorded in January 1987 at Birmingham’s Rich Bitch Studios with Rob Bruce and producer Mike Ivory. It was released later that year through Under One Flag Records, a subsidiary of Music for Nations. Sacrilege underwent a significant line-up change at this juncture, replacing drummer Baker with Paul Brookes, bassist May with Paul Morrisey and adding rhythm guitarist Frank Healey. After a further change, this time replacing Brookes with new drummer Spikey T. Smith, the new line-up recorded the band’s third album, Turn Back Trilobite, issued in April 1989. This record saw the band moving away from their thrash metal roots into a more doom metal musical direction, with touches of folk. Sacrilege split up quietly in the early 1990s.

After Sacrilege, Healey and Baker would go on to join Cerebral Fix, with Healey later joining Benediction and Baker also playing in an early incarnation of Cathedral. Brookes would also Benediction, and then metal act Marshall Law in 1999.

Television networks are having a busy month trying to stamp out new TV-watching technology, including telling a court that skipping a commercial while watching a recorded show is illegal. Yesterday, Fox, NBC, and CBS all sued Dish Network over its digital video recorder with automatic commercial-skipping. The same networks, plus ABC, Univision, and PBS, are gearing up for a May 30 hearing in their cases against Aereo, a New York startup bringing local broadcast TV to the Internet. EFF and Public Knowledge filed an amicus brief supporting Aereo this week.

Police executed a search warrant on Wednesday morning after a call from the Kinyua family in which the brother said he found two metal tins containing a head and two hands in the laundry room of the house. During their search, police reportedly retrieved the head and hands. They also found more body parts inside a dumpster a few blocks away. When they interviewed the suspect, police said Kinyua admitted to cutting up the victim with a knife and cannibalizing the heart and portions of the brain. Although the body parts had yet to be identified by the chief medical examiner, authorities believe they belong to Agyei-Kodie, said sheriff’s spokeswoman Monica Worrell.

After the first no-hitter in New York Mets history, SNY caught a special glimpse of the team in the locker room afterward. Ironically, this is during an interview with a player named R.A. Dickey.

A man who filmed himself chopping up his lover before posting body parts to politicians was being hunted across Europe last night. Luka Magnotta, who is suspected of cannibalism, flew from Canada to France a day after placing gruesome footage of the murder on the internet. Police fear the gay porn star may now have slipped into Britain. Six months ago, he was living in a £40-a-night room above the Fusilier Inn in Wembley, North London, while sightseeing in the capital.

By now almost everyone knows (I hope!) that LA has a subway system. But did you know that this is not the first subway that LA has ever had?

Seriously, is there anything that says “we have zombies” more than the CDC denying we have zombies? The web chatter started in earnest last weekend, when a gruesome story out of Florida went viral, in which an apparently psychotic man attacked another, chewing the second’s face for nearly twenty minutes before police were forced to fire off a full clip at the assailant, eventually killing him. (It was reported that the attacker carried on chewing his victim’s flesh after having been shot, which is a behavior many associate with zombie tropes on TV and in film.) But it wasn’t just the Florida face-chewing incident that got web searchers buzzing. Another incident involved a doctor who began spitting blood at arresting officers during a traffic stop and was difficult to subdue afterwards at the hospital, and a few incidents in which hazmat teams were dispatched to schools after reports of unexplainable rashes popping up among large numbers of students.

“[Please retweet] I am offering my male genitals (full penis, testes, scrotum) as a meal for 100,000 yen …Will prepare and cook as the buyer requests, at his chosen location.” Just days after Sugiyama’s 22nd birthday, the artist underwent elective genital-removal surgery, divvied up the severed penis shaft, testicles, and scrotal skin between five people, and garnished it with button mushrooms and Italian parsley. On April 13, five of six diners who signed up for the $250-a-plate feast, sat down to dinner. The sixth person was a no-show.

Media outlets are reporting that Rudy Eugene, a.k.a. the “Miami Zombie,” who chewed a man’s face off (and even ate his eyeballs) did so because he was “overdosing” on bath salts, “a new potent form of LSD,” and maybe also cocaine. These reports are based entirely on speculation by police spokesmen and media excited to fan the flames of fear in Miami. No toxicology tests were performed, no drug paraphernalia found on the scene. Bath salts are not “the new LSD,” and calling them the new LSD is propaganda for the media to gobble up. Bath salts and LSD have almost nothing in common chemically, and there is no hard evidence (outside of one police spokesman’s speculation) that Rudy Eugene was high on anything. Not only are his statements not supported by science, they are at odds with common sense. But the media love a good drug scare story, so they’re repeating the statements of one Miami cop, Armando Aguilar.

New findings from the Monell Center reveal that humans can identify the age of other humans based on differences in body odor. Much of this ability is based on the capacity to identify odors of elderly individuals, and contrary to popular supposition, the so-called ‘old-person smell’ is rated as less intense and less unpleasant than body odors of middle-aged and young individuals.

A loose coalition of eco-anarchist groups is increasingly launching violent attacks on scientists. A group calling itself the Olga Cell of the Informal Anarchist Federation International Revolutionary Front has claimed responsibility for the non-fatal shooting of a nuclear-engineering executive on 7 May in Genoa, Italy. The same group sent a letter bomb to a Swiss pro-nuclear lobby group in 2011; attempted to bomb IBM’s nanotechnology laboratory in Switzerland in 2010; and has ties with a group responsible for at least four bomb attacks on nanotechnology facilities in Mexico. Security authorities say that such eco-anarchist groups are forging stronger links.

Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern, is being reintroduced into DC Comics in a big way: as the main superhero of the parallel-world Earth 2, and as a gay man.

If you want any evidence that drugs have won the drug war, you just need to read the scientific studies on legal highs. If you’re not keeping track of the ‘legal high’ scene it’s important to remember that the first examples, synthetic cannabinoids sold as ‘Spice’ and ‘K2′ incense, were only detected in 2009. Shortly after amphetamine-a-like stimulant drugs, largely based on variations on pipradrol and the cathinones appeared, and now ketamine-like drugs such as methoxetamine have become widespread. Since 1997, 150 new psychoactive substances were reported. Almost a third of those appeared in 2010. Last year, the US government banned several of these drugs although the effect has been minimal as the legal high laboratories have over-run the trenches of the drug warriors. A new study just published in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology tracked the chemical composition of legal highs as the bans were introduced.

A Catholic priest has claimed a missing schoolgirl was kidnapped for Vatican sex parties and has implicated diplomatic staff and members of the Holy See. Italian priest Gabriel Amorth, 85, said girls were recruited for parties at the Vatican and said the death of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi, last seen alive in 1983, “was a crime with a sexual motive”. The priest spoke out last week as investigators broke into the grave of a known gang boss in Rome following an anonymous tip that the key to Emanuala’s disappearance would be “found there”. But so far bones which do not belong to mobster Enrico De Pedis, have not be positively identified as the girl’s. In an interview with La Stampa newspaper, Father Amorth said: “It has already previously been stated by (deceased) monsignor Simeone Duca, an archivist at the Vatican, who was asked to recruit girls for parties with the help of the Vatican gendarmes.

Obesity is a widespread epidemic, even among the homeless. While the popularized image of a homeless individual is one of skin and bones, a new study shows the reality is not so. One in three (32.3%) homeless individuals in the United States is obese, highlighting a hunger-obesity paradox. The paradox is that hunger and obesity can exist in the same person. And although a person may be overweight or obese, he or she can lack proper nutrition. Nutrition is a daily challenge for homeless people, as the foods they manage to get are often full of preservatives and high in sodium, fats and sugars. They may not have access to healthier options like fresh fruits and vegetables.

If you are thinking about tweeting about clouds, pork, exercise or even Mexico, think again. Doing so may result in a closer look by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In a story appearing earlier today on the U.K’s Daily Mail website, it was reported that the DHS has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor various social networking sites. The list provides a glimpse into what DHS describes as “signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S.” The list was posted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center who filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act, before suing to obtain the release of the documents. The documents were part of the department’s 2011 ’Analyst’s Desktop Binder‘ used by workers at their National Operations Center which instructs workers to identify ‘media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities’.

Germany fed a whopping 22 gigawatts of solar power per hour into the national grid last weekend, setting a new record by meeting nearly half of the country’s weekend power demand. After the Fukushima disaster, Japan opted to shut down all of its nuclear power stations and Germany followed suit after considerable public pressure. This seems to have paved the way for greater investment in solar energy projects. The Renewable Energy Industry (IWR) in Muenster announced that Saturday’s solar energy generation met nearly 50 percent of the nation’s midday electricity needs AND was equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity!

We’ve seen snake robots and, of course, tons of surgery robots (including the weird lamprey-bot), but Dr. Michael Argenziano, the Chief of Adult Cardiac Surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center in New York, says we’ll soon have fully untethered snake-type robots that will crawl through the human body, assisting with all kinds of fixes and maintenance.

State prison inmates are just as likely to have sexual contact with prison staff as they are with other prisoners, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report. The report found that about 5.3 percent of former state prisoners reported sexual encounters of some kind involving facility staff. Of those, 1.2 percent reported that staff had forced them into the sex acts.

Food conspiracy theories are pretty interesting. The famous Church’s Fried Chicken chain has one associated it, and it originated in the mid-’80s. At the time, it was believed that the company was owned by White supremacist gang the Klu Klux Klan (KKK), who have always had a vendetta against African Americans. Since it is no secret that the KKK hates Black people, it was allegedly thought that these haters tainted their chicken recipe with an ingredient that would render all Black men sterile.

A Philadelphia cop was arrested over allegations that he abducted a 14-year-old girl, sexually assaulted her and made her watch him have sex with a prostitute. Police found Anthony Dattilo, 36, at a motel in the Bensalem area of the city Wednesday while responding to a possible abduction, according to the Bucks County Courier Times. Dattilo, a 12-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department, is reportedly in custody at the Bucks County prison on $500,000 bail.

A high school art teacher in Tucson is accused of having sex with four of her students. KVOA reports that Melissa Dalton was initially booked on four counts of sexual conduct with a minor on April 30. After she posted bail and was released, more students came forward with details about the 33-year-old wife and mother’s other alleged sexual encounters. That prompted police to add eight more counts, including six of sex with a minor. Police started the investigation after one of the alleged victims told his cousin he had sex with Dalton. According to KVOA, one student claimed Dalton sent him explicit text messages containing photos of her posing in front of a bathroom mirror. Dalton’s cell phone was confiscated by police, along with the phones of the students involved.

Additional testing has confirmed beach rocks that spontaneously combusted in a Southern California woman’s pocket contained elevated levels of phosphorus, an official said Friday. The source of the substance is still unclear, but an expert says it probably was manmade. Results from an independent lab matched those obtained by the Orange County Public Health Care Agency, which examined the rocks immediately after the May 12 incident, agency spokeswoman Deanne Thompson said. Lyn Hiner, 43, suffered second- and third-degree burns on her right leg from her thigh to her knee and on her right arm when the rocks set her shorts on fire several hours after her children collected them on a San Clemente beach. Hiner couldn’t extinguish the flames, and her husband suffered second-degree burns when he tried to help her.

One of the fastest ways to ruin the Internet would be to put the United Nations in charge of it. Unfortunately, that is exactly what the United Nations wants. The United Nations is now pushing very hard for complete control over the Internet. A proposal that has the support of China, Russia, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Iran would give control of the Internet to the UN’s International Telecommunication Union.

The white haze that hangs over many major cities could become a familiar sight everywhere if the world decides to try geoengineering to create a cooler planet. Scientists have long suspected that one oft-discussed geoengineering technique — shooting tiny sulfate particles into the upper atmosphere to deflect sunlight — could turn the blue sky white. Nature has already provided a basic proof of concept. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, spewing tons of sulfate particles in the atmosphere, it temporarily whitened the sky. Now a new study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science attempts to determine just how big the effect from man-made geoengineering would be. Adding enough sulfate to the stratosphere to block 2 percent of the sun’s light would make the sky three to five times brighter

Jintu Gogoi’s neighbourhood in Sadiya, Upper Assam, is no longer friendly. Over two weeks ago, an army of eight-legged freaks invaded it. It all happened in the evening on May 8. Most of the inhabitants of Chaulkhowa Nagaon village had been to a Bihu function. When the programme drew to a close, swarms of spiders suddenly descended from nowhere and started biting the people. The festive mood soon turned into one of panic with people bumping into each other and tripping over empty benches in their frantic bid to egress. Jintu was bitten by one of these critters.

They were written to teach children colours and strange words but distorted versions of bouncy Sesame Street songs have been used to torture Guantanamo Bay prisons for days, it has been claimed. The staggering assertion has been made in a documentary from Al Jazeera and follows previous claims in 2008 that heavier tunes such as Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’ and Drowning Pool’s ‘Bodies’ were played incessantly to prisoners at the naval base in Cuba. According to the report ‘innocent children’s songs were abused for inhumane purposes’ as music from the popular US children programme was blasted repeatedly into prisoners’ ears.

Witnesses say two men in the Brightmoor neighborhood were so passionate about the way they make Kool-Aid, they started arguing with each other over who does it better. Sadly, that fight took a horrifying turn when they both pulled out guns and started firing at each other. Again, this was over Kool-Aid. They didn’t hit each other, but two innocent bystanders suffered gunshot wounds in the soft drink shooting. Police call it utterly ridiculous, but they’ve seen worse.

This helpful hygiene education pamphlet promotes a 1950’s and 60’s line of training bras for young girls interested in growing boobies. Their sage wisdom includes: Thinnies should go heavy on cheese, bread, butter, milk. Plumpies should favor salads, lean meat, non-fat milk. Wear a bra to increase self-confidence, even if you have no breasts. Your mother will understand. Swimming, Tennis and stretching are all super for your bust line. Looking good mostly means walking with your head up, shoulders back, chest up, and stomach in. Doctors agree that the delicate glands and tissues of the developing breasts need proper support. If you’re shy or uncomfortable, just pretend you’re not. Be sure to check out the “Littlest Angel” bra with patented nylon “Gro-Cup” that expands in the event of boob sproutage. Also available: “Dainti-Teen Sanitary panty-belt.” Sorry ladies, white only.

Hop on Tumblr for a few minutes, and at least 50% of what you’ll see will be one of the following: cats, and girls in slutty poses wearing metal shirts. While I totally support girls taking slutty pics of themselves and putting them on the internet, I have to make sure we all understand what’s really happening. Brahs, don’t be fooled: GIRLS DON’T ACTUALLY LIKE METAL!

Half of Americans think Facebook is a passing fad, according to the results of a new Associated Press-CNBC poll. And, in the run-up to the social network’s initial public offering of stock, half of Americans also say the social network’s expected asking price is too high.

In an extraordinary gathering of nearly 60,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews, leading rabbis of the yeshiva and Hassidic world all but banned the Internet. A halachic decision rendered by Rabbi Shmuel Halevi Wosner, one of the senior rabbis in the Orthodox world, said the Internet could be used for work purposes in an office — but only if absolutely necessary, and with the use of a filter. There was no justification for Internet use at home under any circumstances.

Unless you have the time or the technical know-how to encrypt your digital communications, none of what you transmit – however personal — through a digital wireline or wireless network is “private.” Rather, through the spectacle of post-modern capitalism, the private has become public, the property of the corporation that owns your keystrokes. The digital revolution has morphed the personal into an electronic commodity; the electronic commodity is the exchange currency of an encroaching, 21st-century digital feudalism.

NSFW!

Awesome retro knee socks ‘n mary janes in mud puddles

Photos of the item, which was titled “10 Pack Trayvon Martin Targets,” showed crosshairs over a hoodie similar to the one Trayvon Martin was wearing when he was shot by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman in February. The figure has a bag of Skittle in his pocket and is holding what appears to be a can of iced tea, similar to what Martin had purchased before being gunned down. The pack of 10 targets was being sold for $8.

Mike Apatow, of Milford, poses at Stratford Fire Station, Company 2, in Stratford, Conn. May 10th, 2012, where he works as firefighter. Apatow, who had a radioactive stress test Wednesday, was pulled over later in the day, in Newtown, by a state police trooper after a radioactivity detector in the trooper’s car was set off when Apatow passed. The detectors are used to help identify potential terror threats.

Q. What’s next for Anonymous? A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems.

Newsweek’s cover this week declares that Barack Obama is the “First Gay President,” playing on the reader’s knowledge that Obama isn’t himself gay, but his support for same-sex marriage earns him an honorary rainbow halo. The headline obviously calls back to 1998, when Toni Morrison declared Bill Clinton the first black president in The New Yorker, which at the time was edited by current Newsweek editor Tina Brown. “Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas,” Morrison wrote, laying out the formula for how to declare a President has attained the identity of someone else through actions and behaviors. Newsweek’s cover has been called “controversial” and “pretty shocking,” but it’s merely the most recent in presidential firsts that weren’t for the country’s actual first black president.

General Motors Co. plans to stop advertising with Facebook Inc. after deciding that paid ads on the site have little impact on consumers’ car purchases, according to a GM official. The move by GM, one of the largest advertisers in the U.S., puts a spotlight on an issue that many marketers have been raising: whether ads on Facebook help them sell more products. On Friday, Facebook is expected to sell shares in an initial public offering that could put a market value on the company of as much as $104 billion.

After footage surfaced of Occupy Wall Street protesters in Minnesota making claims that they’ve been drugged by police officers, authorities in the state have opened up a criminal investigation. At least one Minnesota state trooper has been placed on paid leave since law enforcement officers began investigating allegations that cops arrived at Occupy Wall Street encampments and drugged protesters. Independent filmmakers and journalists in the state say that they have encountered members of local Occupy offshoots who say they have been offered drugs by law enforcement officers. Protesters who opt in to the program are stoned for free while, in turn, cops monitor the effects of the intoxicants. Dan Feidt, an independent journalist who has investigated these claims, says there was nothing that complicated about the process: “The sheriff is getting people to do drugs and then they drop you back off at the plaza,” he tells RT.

The Obama administration could easily and justifiably move marijuana to, say, schedule III, which happens to be the same schedule that synthetic THC is in, making medical marijuana legal under federal law. There would be nothing unusual, extraordinary or legally suspect about Obama doing this. The executive branch has often moved certain drugs to lower or higher schedules based on new data without Congressional involvement. In fact, multiple sitting governors have petitioned the Obama administration asking him to move marijuana to a lower schedule, so he should be aware of the flexible authority he has. Obama is not some hapless victim whose actions on this issue are constrained by congressional law. The truth is pretty much the exact opposite. Under current law Obama effectively has the power to unilaterally make medical marijuana legal.

Unit 2 we now know completely liquified. We’ve never seen this before in the history of nuclear power. A 100% liquification of a uranium core.

Private emails, meeting transcripts and other key documents reveal that both the Obama White House and the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission(NRC) were well aware of just how bad things really were with Fukushima from the early days of the disaster, but did nothing to warn the public about it. In fact, NRC and the White House purposely did not warn Americans about a massive radiation plume that struck the West Coast just days after the massive earthquake and tsunami hit Japan’s eastern coast. According to information gathered from hundreds of pages worth of private NRC emails, conference calls and secret meetings, key players in the Fukushima whitewashing campaign, including the NRC’s David McIntyre and Elliot Brenner, were hard at work in the days following the disaster distracting public attention away from it. By pretending that a radioactive plume did not exist while simultaneously sending out misinformation to the media

LEFT your phone at home again? A solution is at hand: make sure it is with you at all times by having it implanted in your arm. But given the opportunity, would you want your gadget to be a permanent part of you? The question may need answering sooner than you think. Researchers at Autodesk, a software company in Toronto, Canada, checked to see whether the methods we currently use to interface with our gadgets work when the device is implanted in human tissue. The answer was a resounding “yes”. A button, an LED and a touch sensor all functioned appropriately when embedded under the skin of a cadaver’s arm. The team was even able to communicate transcutaneously using a Bluetooth connection and charge the electronics wirelessly. “That’s the bottom line,” says Christian Holz of the Autodesk team, who presented the work this week at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Austin, Texas. “Traditional user interfaces work through the skin.”

Piezoelectric devices promise to draw power from your footsteps or heartbeat, change the channel on your TV, and complete all sorts of helpful tasks — but they generally work in the nano-mechanical realm, requiring synthetic materials to function. Now for the first time, scientists have built a piezoelectric device using biological materials — in this case, viruses. Future sneakers may come with a customized viral mat on the bottom, with millions of would-be pathogens working together to power your mp3 player.

✪ The Crown Vic is dead; Long live the Crown Vic

In September, the last of the iconic cop cars — a veteran of countless street chases, both actual and theatrical — rolled off Ford’s production line in St. Thomas, Ontario. Hundreds of Crown Vics continue to serve and protect throughout Southern California, but it’s only a matter of miles before the law enforcement workhorse passes into cop legend. Like a cockroach, however, the Crown Vic is resilient. It’s already begun quietly colonizing civilian car culture, notably in Los Angeles County, where the number now in private hands — 38,000 — is second only to that in metropolitan New York, according to auto information company Edmunds.com.

A rogue cop from the DeKalb County Police Department in the state of Georgia is in the news for the third time in only seven months. Officer Jerad Wheeler is now being investigated after kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach. No charges have been filed against Officer Wheeler for kicking Raven Dozier in the abdomen after the cop responded to a call involving a child custody issue, reports local television station WSBTV News. Dozier says she was trying to calm her brother down during police questioning after a police officer used a Taser gun on her sibling. After her brother was shot, Ms. Dozier says she started crying and questioning the officer over his actions. That’s when Wheeler is reported to have gotten violent.

SICK web trolls stole a picture of a young girl with Down’s Syndrome and posted it on Facebook with a caption saying “lose your virginity to a retard”.

Is there a secret plan to evacuate some residents of Chicago in the event of major trouble during the NATO summit next month? CBS 2 has uncovered some evidence that there is. It comes from the Milwaukee area branch of the American Red Cross. CBS 2 News has obtained a copy of a Red Cross e-mail sent to volunteers in the Milwaukee area. It said the NATO summit “may create unrest or another national security incident. The American Red Cross in southeastern Wisconsin has been asked to place a number of shelters on standby in the event of evacuation of Chicago.”

Unfortunately, the sexuality of mentally disabled people has historically been ignored or denied (Carmody 1996). Prior to the last decade, most of this population was housed in large, sex-segregated institutions with few opportunities to socialize. Society in the past has tended to view mentally disabled people as asexual or, if they appear overly affectionate, hyper-sexual (Carmody 1996). However, personal relationships and sexuality are essential to the normal development of all adults, including those adults both with and without physical and/or mental disabilities (Smith 1995). While some mentally disabled individuals may not be able to participate in the most typical societal relationship – marriage with children – they can still participate in interpersonal relationships in meaningful ways. The healthy expression of sexuality need not require sexual intercourse, and can take a broad range of forms including close friendship, physical close-ness, and nongenital contact.

Another woman who attended Friday’s function said she watched on, “absolutely disgusted”, as children were given the chocolates. “My nine-year-old grandson gave this zip-lock bag to me, put it in my lap and said to me, ‘You’ve got a willy in there Nanny’,” she said. “Then I had a three-year-old sit down next to me and she said, ‘Hey, what’s this?’ She had this brown chocolate shaped like a penis and was about to eat the top off it.

Pub landlords will be banned from posting signs reading: “Come and watch the London Games from our big screen!” Fans in the crowd won’t be allowed to upload snippets of the day’s action to YouTube – or even, potentially, to post their snaps from inside the Olympic Village on Facebook. And a crack team of branding “police”, the Games organisers Locog have acknowledged, will be checking every bathroom in every Olympic venue – with the power to remove or tape over manufacturers’ logos even on soap dispensers, wash basins and toilets.

A COMMUNITY of dwarves have set up their very own theme park — with themselves as the star attraction — and these are the latest picture from inside it. comment on this story Residents of the Dwarf Empire must be under 4ft 3 ins tall, and they run their own police force and fire brigade from their 108 residents.

The discovery of a giant meat-eating dinosaur sporting a downy coat has some scientists reimagining the look of Tyrannosaurus rex. With a killer jaw and sharp claws, T. rex has long been depicted in movies and popular culture as having scaly skin. But the discovery of an earlier relative suggests the king of dinosaurs may have had a softer side. The evidence comes from the unearthing of a new tyrannosaur species in northeastern China that lived 60 million years before T. rex. The fossil record preserved remains of fluffy down, making it the largest feathered dinosaur ever found. If a T. rex relative had feathers, why not T. rex? Scientists said the evidence is trending in that direction. “People need to start changing their image of T. rex,” said Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who was not part of the discovery team.

THE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts. But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.

A new gadget is designed to get people drunk INSTANTLY. The makers claim, however, that the ‘harm’ is limited, because you sober up equally rapidly. The alcohol is delivered via an aerosol spray, so people feel briefly drunk, then sober up. But however quickly people might recover, drunkenness can lead to accidents – and it’s also unclear how the device could be misused by alcoholics. Two American scientists designed the device – a small spray that gives you that instant drunk sensation from less than a drop of alcohol. The feeling lasts just seconds – but when it fades, you are sober and able to carry on with your day. The ‘Wahh Quantum Sensations’ delivers just a miniscule dose of alcohol – 0.075ml – directly in to your mouth, but thanks to the aerosol effect, the effect is instantaneous.

Following 9/11, news media accelerated at an amazing rate, and most companies adopted internet versions of their paper or magazines. Before this was commonplace, many interesting pieces of information from that day were most likely never reprinted again– due to false information or just abandonment by the person feeding the propaganda of a particular propagandistic ploy. ‘Part 1’ gives us a look at a ‘Terrorism Survival Guide,’ an actual print magazine which was distributed and sold at grocery stores around the country. We especially like the bio-terror section with the photoshoot of the little girl in a hazmat suit holding a Barbie with a gasmask on. We hope that they continue with this project, it’s fascinating to say the least, and possible they will uncover something most journalists and researchers have completely forgotten.

DETECTIVES are hunting a gang of men behind a string of vile street robberies across Sydney in which they threw faeces on their victims. It’s believed the offenders watch their victims withdraw large sums of cash from financial institutions before distracting them by hurling excrement on their backs. They then offer to help clean up their victims before robbing them.

Have you ever had the experience of stepping away from a novel and finding yourself thinking a little bit like the main character would? I’ve often described the feeling as being a little “book-drunk”, but I usually only experience it with really great novels. It seems to be worse when I read all or most of a book in one session. According to a story over at GalleyCat, scientists have completed a study that verifies that this experience is a common one, and that the actions of fictional characters can actually influence the decisions we make – whether we consciously realize it or not. They call the phenomena “experience-taking”, and it’s very real.

Secret closeup photos of his daughters and their friends playing in a backyard pool has landed a London father in jail for four months. The man, 44, was found guilty of the little-tested law of voyeurism in January. This week, Superior Court Justice Alan Bryant sentenced the man to four months in jail and two years of probation. It’s one of the few voyeurism cases to be tried since the law was enacted in 2005. The man’s photos were discovered in 2009 by one of his daughters when she was using his computer. The photos were of her and her friends — zoom shots of their clothed private areas. They were all in their early teens. London police found more than 6,000 photos focused on their chests, buttocks and genitals. They were filed under the initials of each girl’s name. Some of the photos were taken through the basement window where the man spent a lot of time on the computer. Police also found pictures of the man masturbating.

Tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, skunk oil, and how to deal with them.

A 28-year-old Peeping Tom’s voyeuristic tendencies proved to be a costly habit. So much so that he had to pay with his life. Ram Singh Verma, a resident of Bhashkarnagar, Kalwa in Thane, was allegedly in the habit of peeping through a little hole in the wall to watch his object of fantasy take her daily bath. The lady in question (name withheld) soon discovered that Verma had been watching her. She approached Verma and warned the man for the outrageous act, and even tried to give him a moral lesson to dissuade him from his ways. However, this did not deter Verma, and he allegedly continued to derive voyeuristic gratification as discreetly as possible. On April 28, the woman caught Verma in the act once again. She then approached his roommates, and requested them to try and persuade him against outraging her modesty. The roommates confronted Verma, and got into an argument. When the latter did not budge, they allegedly thrashed Verma and he fell unconscious.

Gender-neutral bathrooms have become a priority at The University of Minnesota-Duluth in Duluth, Minnesota, after student Blair Moses reportedly began a hunger strike. His goal? To convince the school’s administration that they are of paramount necessity. Moses allegedly stated that gender-specific bathrooms are “oppressive” and problematic, thus he took some curious avenues to ensure that more flexible facilities would be installed.

The US military is responsible for the most egregious and widespread pollution of the planet, yet this information and accompanying documentation goes almost entirely unreported. In spite of the evidence, the environmental impact of the US military goes largely unaddressed by environmental organizations and was not the focus of any discussions or proposed restrictions at the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. This impact includes uninhibited use of fossil fuels, massive creation of greenhouse gases, and extensive release of radioactive and chemical contaminants into the air, water, and soil.

Fido’s expressive face, including those longing puppy-dog eyes, may lead owners to wonder what exactly is going on in that doggy’s head. Scientists decided to find out, using brain scans to explore the minds of our canine friends.

The Voice has obtained extremely disturbing images from New York City’s jail system. These photographs—graphically showing knife wounds and beating injuries to the faces, necks, and arms of inmates—were provided to us by Correction Department sources who want the outside world to know that violence has escalated at Rikers Island.

But the disclosure raised fears among critics that the contract is close to privatising core elements of policing: “This is the latest move that seems to be designed to make the police more and more remote from the public we serve,” said Julie Nesbit of the Police Federation. “We believe simply that if you call a cop, you should get a cop, not a security guard, not a uniformed civilian nor an employee of a major international conglomerate. We believe it’s what the public expect and believe that there should be a public debate before parts of the police service are sold off to the highest bidder.”

She pulled down his pants. She used scissors first. When they didn’t work well, she went looking for the scalpels. To keep him still, she pressed her knee onto his windpipe as she crouched over him. One cut was enough. There wasn’t a lot of blood. She thought, I am going to take it off and he’s not going to hurt anyone else. She brought her father’s penis to the stove and turned on the flame. Only the smell of flesh made what she’d done seem real to her. Her stomach lurched. She shut it off, put the burnt organ in a paper towel, and bolted from the house. Later she would throw it under the boardwalk. Thanks Jasmine

Authorities said Broten and Landrum shaved the 12-year-old girl’s hair and forced her to run up and down the hill six times on Monday night as punishment for poor grades. “The parents believed this was appropriate discipline for their daughter to teach her to not get bad grades at school,” said Lt. Michael Monsrud of Fridley.

✪ Mexican authorities investigating porn video made by 6th-graders in grade school classroom

The incident occurred in late April at a grade school in the town of Calkini, which is in a relatively conservative and heavily Indian area. Three boys are seen on the video engaging in oral and anal sex recorded on a cellphone by a fourth person, apparently another student. The mother of one of the boys saw the video on the Internet and notified authorities, Kantun said. He said the video had since been taken down. Authorities didn’t announce the students’ ages, but sixth-graders in Mexico are generally 12 or younger.

Attention, perverts: if you like kiddie porn, you’ll love New York. Probably not the slogan New York State tourism officials were hoping for, but New York has (un)-officially become the Kiddie Porn State thanks to a ruling from the New York State Court of Appeals Tuesday that determined viewing kiddie porn isn’t a crime. Possessing, producing, and distributing child erotica is still illegal (sorry, perverts), but the court decided that “possessing” kiddie porn and viewing it on the Internet are not the same thing. In other words, just because you saw smut on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s your possession, and therefore isn’t illegal under the current law.

Mahoney has been in custody since December, after prosecutors said pornographic videos showing assaults on the girl were found on the computer of a then-32-year-old Texas man. She had been charged with two counts of sexual exploitation of a child but yesterday pleaded guilty to one count. Mahoney also faces state charges of sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault and endangering the welfare of a child. The federal complaint lodged against Mahoney in January describes an approximately four-minute video streamed over the internet in which the child was lying on her stomach, apparently asleep on a bed. Mahoney then knelt beside the child and sexually abused her, the complaint said. In another incident described in the complaint, in which Mahoney allegedly recorded iPhone video while the girl was in a bathtub, Mahoney told her to “lean over sweetheart, so I can rinse you.” The girl asked “like a mermaid?” and Mahoney replied “like a mermaid, sweetheart.” Sexual abuse then ensued

Heidemarie lived nomadically, trading gardening, cleaning, and even therapy sessions for food and a place to sleep. She found it liberating: “Living without money gave me quality of life, inner wealth, and freedom.” Heidemarie has written three books about her experiences. She says the first, “The Star Money Experiment” was quite successful and she passed out all the money she earned to people on the street. She waived her advances on the other books and asked the publisher to give her royalties to charity.

Various reconstructive procedures have been attempted to restore a cosmetically acceptable phallus that would allow normal reproductive, sexual, and urinary function in patients requiring penile reconstruction. However, these procedures are limited by a shortage of native penile tissue. We previously demonstrated that a short segment of the penile corporal body can be replaced using naturally derived collagen matrices with autologous cells. In the current study, we examined the feasibility of engineering the entire pendular penile corporal bodies in a rabbit model. Neocorpora were engineered from cavernosal collagen matrices seeded with autologous cells using a multistep static/dynamic procedure, and these were implanted to replace the excised corpora. The bioengineered corpora demonstrated structural and functional parameters similar to native tissue and male rabbits receiving the bilateral implants were able to successfully impregnate females.

“The state grants a 10-yuan subsidy for amino acids to each graduating senior that will participate in the gao kao (National College Entrance Exam). Any student that feels not well can go to the infirmary and take amino acids on the IV drip,” Mr. Xia explained. He said that some students had been below par recently due to the sudden weather changes in the city of Xiaogan, and the school infirmary had been packed with students. In order to spare students the trouble of running back and forth between the infirmary and the classroom and save their time, the school decided to arrange IV drip sessions right in the classroom.

Nearly two pounds of still-green plant material found in a 2,700-year-old grave in the Gobi Desert has just been identified as the world’s oldest marijuana stash, according to a paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany. A barrage of tests proves the marijuana possessed potent psychoactive properties and casts doubt on the theory that the ancients only grew the plant for hemp in order to make clothing, rope and other objects. They apparently were getting high too.

Filmmakers, fans, activists, artists, and media makers have been reediting television, movies, and news media for critical and political purposes since almost the very beginning of moving pictures. Over the past century, this subversive form of populist remixing has been called many things, including appropriation art, détournement, media jamming, found footage, avant-garde film, television hacking, telejusting, political remix, scratch video, vidding, outsider art, antiart, and even cultural terrorism. The politically oriented mashup video subgenre has its roots in the rich and diverse history of left-leaning, often deeply antiauthoritarian, creative traditions. These transformative works, by their very nature, are suspicious of and challenge political, corporate, media, and social power structures. They focus on a wide array of issues, including race, gender, sexuality, and economics, in addition to more overtly political topics of government, public policy, and warfare.

A study of nearly 4,000 teenagers published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, shows that secondary school children who take methamphetamine (speed) and MDMA (ecstasy) appear to be prone to depression later on. The study results proved to be independent of previous bouts of depressive symptoms or other drug use. Speed and ecstasy first gained popularity amongst clubbers and people in the rave scene. However, both drugs have also become increasingly popular in the general population, such as secondary school children, who, according to the researchers, often take both drugs at the same time.

Cocaine may speed up the aging of the brain, according to new research that finds that people who are addicted to the drug lose twice the brain volume each year as non-drug users. As the brain ages, it inevitably loses gray matter, the part of brain tissue made up of neuron cell bodies. Loss of gray matter is linked with many of the signs of old age, including memory problems and other declining cognitive abilities, said study researcher Karen Ersche, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge. Middle-age cocaine-dependent people show many of the signs of aging, including cognitive decline, Ersche told LiveScience. To look at the underlying cause, she and her colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure gray matter volume in 60 adults with cocaine dependence and 60 adults without substance-use troubles who were similar to the cocaine-abusing volunteers in age, gender and verbal IQ.

A friend of a man accused of stabbing his mother to death reports the alleged stabber, may have been on a hallucinogenic, called, ‘Psychedelic DMT’. Twenty-two year-old William Walsh remains in jail, charged with stabbing his mother to death at their home over the weekend. DMT is a very expensive illegal drug, hard to find on the streets. “You shouldnt take anything you wont be able to control,” said Brian Chambers with the Memphis Division of the US Drug Enforcement Agency. According to Chambers, Psychedelic DMT is such a powerful drug, it drives people under the influence to do things they wouldn’t normally do. “They start hearing things, they get paranoid, they start seeing things that aren’t there.” expressed Chambers. Powerful, vivid hallucinations aren’t the only side effects. The crystal that’s crushed and then, snorted, smoked or shot up, can cause users to become short of breath, pass out, even die.

A 30-year-old woman who died suddenly in 2010 drank too much Coca-Cola says her partner. Natasha Marie Harris, a mother of eight, died in February 2010 from a cardiac arrest, and her partner Christopher Hodgkinson told an inquest into her death yesterday that she drank at least 10 litres a day, the Otago Daily Times reports. When he found out in 2011 Coke could be the cause, he was irate and made threats to Coca-Cola. Medical records said Ms Harris died of a cardiac arrhythmia, which a doctor in court yesterday said could have been caused by excessive consumption of a sugary drink. Dr Dan Mornin said the consumption can cause severe hypokalemia, a lack of potassium in the blood which could lead to cardiac arrythmias. But Mr Hodgkinson said he had no idea a soft drink like Coca-Cola could kill her at the time. He said she drank it first and last thing each day and throughout the day, and vomited regularly.

Dangerous currents swirl around Sotobanari island, which has not a drop of natural water, and local fishermen rarely land there. But 76-year-old Masafumi Nagasaki has made this kidney-shaped island in Japan’s tropical Okinawa prefecture his retirement home, with an unusual dress code: nothing at all. Naked, he braves lashing typhoons and biting insects as a hermit in the buff. “I don’t do what society tells me, but I do follow the rules of the natural world. You can’t beat nature so you just have to obey it completely,” he said. “That’s what I learned when I came here, and that’s probably why I get by so well.” The wiry Nagasaki, his skin leathered by the sun of two decades on the island, worked briefly as a photographer before spending years on the murkier side of the entertainment industry. When retirement came, he wanted to get far away from it all. He chose Sotobanari, which is roughly a 1,000 meters across and means “Outer Distant island” in the local dialect.

The past few months have seen dozens of students and other protesters charged with major offences – particularly ‘violent disorder’, which carries with it a maximum five-year sentence. Many people, often in their teens and early twenties, have faced crown court trials and been sent to jail for the flimsiest of reasons – throwing a lightweight placard stick, for example – and their lives have been seriously compromised by the stress and humiliation of a trial (many of which take place over a year after the protest) and the shock of prison. At the same time, policing at protests has been heavy-handed, including the use of kettling, horse charges and batons, and police are pushing for ever more resources (water cannon, rubber bullets) to ‘control’ protesters.

The real grotesqueness isn’t in infantry soldiers taking a few war trophies. No, it’s the idea that’s been sold to the American public that war can be sterile. It’s the idea that 18-year-olds who have been ordered to kill people will never play with the body parts afterward. In this sterile world of war – one undoubtedly sold to the American public to ease their comfort with its perpetual existence – missiles are so precise they can avoid collateral damage, drones can narrow in on specific terrorist targets from the sky, and wars need to be neither bought nor paid for. Or something like that. The unfortunate reality is that war is messy. Missiles hit the wrong targets all the time. Drones accidentally kill women and children. And when 18-year-old infantry soldiers get their first confirmed kill, they high-five, cheer and take a photo.

This blog is by no means an advocate for the sale or purchase of illegal drugs. It is meant solely to provide a brief archive of a complex market and product that can often be dangerous. We believe strongly in the philosophy of HARM REDUCTION among recreational drug users and addicts alike. Information and education saves lives. Please be careful, everyone!

Location services company Navizon has a new system, called Navizon I.T.S., that could allow tracking of visitors in malls, museums, offices, factories, secured areas and just about any other indoor space. It could be used to examine patterns of foot traffic in retail spaces, assure that a museum is empty of visitors at closing time, or even to pinpoint the location of any individual registered with the system. But let’s set all that aside for a minute while we freak out about the privacy implications. Most of us leave Wi-Fi on by default, in part because our phones chastise us when we don’t. (Triangulation by Wi-Fi hotspots is important for making location services more accurate.) But you probably didn’t realize that, using proprietary new “nodes” from Navizon, any device with an active Wi-Fi radio can be seen by a system like Navizon’s.

A family outing to an Olive Garden in Indianapolis turned into a brief horror show this week after the restaurant accidentally served their 10-year-old son an alcoholic drink. The boy was taken to the hospital on Thursday. The child–who has not been indenified– had ordered a non-alcoholic Frullato Smoothie, but the waitress mistakenly brought him a 4-ounce cocktail, WISH-TV reported. After realizing the error, the waitress told the restaurant’s management, which informed the boy’s parents. The parents took their son to a local hospital, where tests revealed alcohol in his system. A police officer at the hospital described the boy as “alert” but “shaken up,” according to the local television station.

President Barack Obama is the drug brand of choice for many dealers. Since his election in 2008, the Commander-in-Chief’s name and face has been slapped on a wide variety of contraband products including ecstasy pills, LSD tabs, heroin baggies and a popular strain of medical marijuana.

Sure, it’s not that shocking that a few of these famous writers and actors dropped acid back in the day. But we were surprised to find out how some athletes, scientists and groundbreaking innovators used LSD and how profoundly it affected them personally and professionally. Watch the video about to learn about how some of our most culturally prolific leaders and artists used the psychedelic drug.

This is how I — a journalism graduate student with no background in forensics — became certified as a “Forensic Consultant” by one of the field’s largest professional groups. One afternoon early last year, I punched in my credit card information, paid $495 to the American College of Forensic Examiners International Inc. and registered for an online course. After about 90 minutes of video instruction, I took an exam on the institute’s web site, answering 100multiple choice questions, aided by several ACFEI study packets. As soon as I finished the test, a screen popped up saying that I had passed, earning me an impressive-sounding credential that could help establish my qualifications to be an expert witness in criminal and civil trials. For another $50, ACFEI mailed me a white lab coat after sending my certificate.

✪ A troubling trend in teens drinking hand sanitizer

The liquid hand sanitizer is 62% ethyl alcohol and makes a 120-proof liquid. A few drinks can cause a person’s speech to slur and stomach to burn, and make people so drunk that they have to be monitored in the emergency room. Doctors said this is the latest over-the-counter product that teenagers have adapted for a quick high. Teenagers have done the same with mouthwash, cough syrup and even vanilla extract. “Over the years, they have ingested all sorts of things,” said Helen Arbogast, injury prevention coordinator in the trauma program at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “Cough syrup had reached a very sexy point where young people were using it…. We want to be sure this doesn’t take on the same trend.”

The best way to drink hand sanitizer is straight, like whisky, and down it “like a shot,” explains Tyler, a Grade 10 student who lives in Toronto. Undiluted, the alcohol-based liquid tastes a little like “vodka and bug spray,” he adds.

Chancellor Katehi, on her part, “thought she made it clear” that when police ordered the students to leave, they were (a) not to wear riot gear into the camp, (b) not to carry weapons of any kind into the camp, (c) were not to use force of any kind against the students, and (d) were not to make any arrests. But all that anybody else on that conference call heard her say out loud was “I don’t want another situation like they just had at Berkeley,” and Chief Spicuzza interpreted that as “no swinging of clubs.” Chief Spicuzza “thought she made it clear” more than once that no riot gear was to be worn and no clubs or pepper sprayers were to be carried. What Lieutenant Pike said back to her, each time, was, “Well, I hear you say that you don’t want us to, but we’re going to.” And they did, including that now-infamous Mk-9 military-grade riot-control pepper sprayer that he used. Oh, funny thing about that particular model of pepper-sprayer? It’s illegal for California cops to possess or use.

“This is the only court in the United States where you can plead guilty and still be given the death penalty, and it’s just another sign that the system is not set up to give anyone a trial it’s set up to give someone what appears to be a fair trial with a predetermined result,” Broyles said.* “It’s pretty clear to me that the public has lost interest in these issues,” Richard Kammen, a death penalty expert representing accused USS Cole attack plotter Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, told TPM. “There’s certainly a lot more interest in Trayvon Martin, for example, than there is in any of the military commissions, with the exception being the arraignment for the 9/11 people. But the day-to-day stuff, which is really quite important, has drifted off peoples’ consciences.” Kammen called the reforms instituted by the Obama administration in 2009 “quite superficial” and said there are “huge, huge problems” in the military commissions system.

Watching pornography would seem to be a vision-intensive task. But new research finds that looking at erotic movies can actually quiet the part of the brain that processes visual stimuli. Most of the time, watching movies or conducting any other visual task sends extra blood flow to this brain region. Not so when the movies are explicit, the researchers found. Instead, the brain seems to shunt blood — and therefore energy — elsewhere, perhaps to regions of the brain responsible for sexual arousal. Turns out, the brain may not need to take in all the visual details of a sex scene, said study researcher Gert Holstege, a uroneurologist at the University of Groningen Medical Center in the Netherlands.

From the archives of British Pathé, a look at Burgess Hill, a one-of-a-kind British boarding school in which nothing was forbidden and students were “allowed to find out for themselves whether conventions are good or bad.” In other words, plenty of cigarette smoking, mod styles, R&B; dancing, abstract painting, and motorbike races. Based on the revolutionary idea that kids should be happy: Burgess Hill was a progressive boarding school in Hertfordshire, England in the 1960s. Run by a Cambridge graduate, it allowed the kids to do what ever they liked! We can’t quite work out whether this is the best or worst school in the world. Would actually be interesting to know what became of these kids.

And it was only when the police came knocking one morning that Jamie’s secret life was exposed. After identifying that someone in the house was accessing child porn, they took Jamie’s laptop away for examination. Jamie is only 13 — and he still hasn’t even kissed a girl, let alone had sex. Though he is only a child himself, the result is that he has been put on the Sex Offender Register, blighting his life for the foreseeable future. Even with intensive therapy, Jamie still suffers from deep shame — ‘as if it is written across my forehead’ — which has led him to fear he will never be able to form a healthy relationship with a woman.

✪ Israel’s top general says Iran unlikely to make bomb

Israel’s military chief said he does not believe Iran will decide to build an atomic bomb and called its leaders “very rational” – comments that clashed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assessment. Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz’s remarks, in an interview published on Wednesday in the left-wing Haaretz newspaper, drew little attention in Israel on its annual remembrance day for fallen soldiers, when political discourse is suspended. But they will add fuel to an internal debate on the prospects of Iran weaponizing its uranium enrichment program and the wisdom and risks of any Israeli military strike to try to prevent Tehran from becoming a nuclear power.

In order to gain stronger public perception of new crowd control technology, the US miltary has been showcasing a new weapon dubbed the “pain ray”. The system cost more than $120m developing the technology and was deployed in Afghanistan two years ago

A Bloomington man was attacked and knocked to the ground by a man who wanted to steal his bucket of fried chicken, police said. A 22-year-old man was walking home in the 500 block of South Park Ridge Road just before 1 a.m. Wednesday when he was confronted, police said. Sean M. Nelson, 24, demanded the man give him his bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and began slapping and punching him when he refused, police said. The victim suffered a chipped tooth, red marks on his neck and a torn shirt, police said.

A father has been jailed for setting up a hidden camera in the bathroom where his daughters showered. The Adelaide District Court heard the 50-year-old man had developed an obsession with child pornography which he kept hidden from his family. Police raided his Adelaide home last June and seized more than 2,000 pornographic files from his computer. They also found edited movies of naked teenage girls which had been filmed by a small camera on a storage shelf in the family bathroom. The court heard the youngest daughter could be identified clothed in one of the videos but the naked girls could not be identified. Judge Geoffrey Muecke said the man denied those filmed were his daughters, but said they were of two of his daughter’s friends, aged 14 and 15.

A four-year-old Saudi boy shot his father in the head while playing with his gun at their house, reportedly after his parent refused to buy him a PlayStation video game console. ­After the boy and his father returned home from the shop, the man, in his forties, put down his pistol while taking off his shirt. He did not notice that his son had grabbed his gun and was playing with it before putting his little finger on the trigger. The father died instantly. Some media reports however suggest the death was an accident, although Arabic media has already labeled the boy the youngest killer in Saudi Arabia.

Egyptian husbands will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives – for up to six hours after their death. The controversial new law is part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament. It will also see the minimum age of marriage lowered to 14 and the ridding of women’s rights of getting education and employment. Thanks Adam Tetzloff

Sergeant Gary Stein will be kicked out of the Marines for Facebook comments he made criticizing President Obama on a page used by Marine meteorologists. He’ll get an other-than-honorable discharge and lose most of his benefits, three months before his contract would have been completed. “I’m having a hard time seeing how 15 words on Facebook could have ruined my nine-year career,” he said. Stein posted, “Screw Obama and I will not follow all orders from him.” Service members are allowed to criticize political candidates, but not as representatives of the Armed Forces.

Four current and former Transportation Security Administration screeners have been arrested and face charges of taking bribes and looking the other way while suitcases filled with cocaine, methamphetamine or marijuana passed through X-ray machines at Los Angeles International Airport, federal authorities announced Wednesday. The TSA screeners, who were arrested Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, allegedly received up to $2,400 in cash bribes in exchange for allowing large drug shipments to pass through checkpoints in what the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles called a “significant breakdown” of security.

President George Bush, President Barack Obama, and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney all work for the exact same handful of corporate-financier interests. While they vary in how they dress up their methods of carrying out what is essentially a singular agenda, there is glaring continuity from one administration to the next in a process analogous to a corporate spokesman presenting the agenda of the board of directors. Changing spokesmen doesn’t change the agenda of the board of directors. While the corporate media focuses on non-issues, and political pundits accentuate petty political rivalries between the “left” and the “right,” a look deeper into presidential cabinets and the authors of domestic and foreign policy reveals just how accurate this analogy is and who sits on the “board of directors.”

Even by the standards of New Agey, cult-friendly LA, Zeena Schreck had a bizarre and abusive upbringing at the hands of parents who made the devil more famous than he’s ever been. Zeena is the daughter of Church of Satan (CoS) founders Anton LaVey and Diane Hegarty, as well as the recipient of its first baptism. By 13, she had been completely indoctrinated by the CoS, received death threats regularly, and was pregnant. She went on to be ordained the CoS’s high priestess and spokesperson just as Reagan-era yuppies began to completely freak over tales of children being sacrificed in the woods by her congregation. Against all odds, Zeena managed to rebel against the self-absorbed zealots who raised her and left the church in 1990 with her husband, Nikolas Schreck. In 2002, the couple founded the Sethian Liberation Movement, a religious body that allows people to learn and practice magic without answering to an oppressive sect and helps free ex-cult members from their troubled pasts.

Locked in frozen vaults on Antarctica and Greenland, a lost world of ancient creatures awaits another chance at life. Like a time-capsule from the distant past, the polar ice sheets offer a glimpse of tiny organisms that may have been trapped there longer than modern humans have walked the planet, biding their time until conditions change and set them free again. With that ice melting at an alarming rate, those conditions could soon be at hand. Masses of bacteria and other microbes – some of which the world hasn’t seen since the Middle Pleistocene, a previous period of major climate change about 750,000 years ago – will make their way back into the environment. Once thought to be too harsh and inhospitable to support any living thing, the ice sheets are now known to be a gigantic reservoir of microbial life. Altogether, the biomass of microbial cells in and beneath the ice sheet may amount to more than 1,000 times that of all the humans on Earth.

But I’m wondering if focusing on the ew-gross aspects of “lean, finely textured beef” (as the industry calls it) doesn’t miss the bigger picture, which is that the meat industry’s very business model is deeply gross. Even if pink slime is purged from the face of the earth, the system that produces our meat and related products (eggs, milk) won’t be fundamentally changed. A while back, I identified something about meat production that’s “even grosser than pink slime”—proposed new rules that would privatize inspection at poultry slaughterhouses while dramatically speeding up kill lines. Here are four more.

‘The unidentified flying object, which bears no resemblance to anything ever spotted near the Sun, somehow manages to withstand the blazing heat thrown off by solar flare activity and the incredibly high temperatures emanating from nuclear fusion generated on the surface of the star. What is it?’ asked the site. UFO fans on YouTube have been highly enthusiastic about the object, with many claiming it as a definite ‘spot’. SOHO, the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory, is a satellite built to study the Sun from its deep core to the outer corona and the solar wind.

UFO Near The Sun

The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that would make it mandatory for all new cars in the United States to include black box data recorders from the year 2015, and would (among many other provisions) permit the IRS to confiscate one’s passport on the suspicion of owing taxes. SB 1813, called the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP 21), passed in the Senate quite easily after heavy promotion from Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif., left). The bill is scheduled for a vote in the House, where Republicans are hoping to add a Keystone XL Pipeline provision before passage.

The discovery of what Chechen scientists believe to be dinosaur eggs is causing a ruckus among paleontologists. The sphere-like fossils were found on a construction site and the area has become a magnet for locals eager to look at the ‘dinos’. Workmen building a new road were blacking through a hillside near the Chechen border with Georgia when they came across what geologists described as a clutch of 60 million year old “eggs”.

But there is another factor that might be playing a role in the increasing rates of the disorder, one that has escaped attention: the military’s use of stimulant medications, like Ritalin and Adderall, in our troops. There has been a significant increase in the use of stimulant medication. Documents that I obtained in late 2010 through the Freedom of Information Act, and have recently analyzed, show that annual spending on stimulants jumped to $39 million in 2010 from $7.5 million in 2001 — more than a fivefold increase. Additional data provided by Tricare Management Activity, the arm of the Department of Defense that manages health care services for the military, reveals that the number of Ritalin and Adderall prescriptions written for active-duty service members increased by nearly 1,000 percent in five years, to 32,000 from 3,000.

Shakespeare said, “a rose by another other name would smell as sweet.” The residents in a small village in Austria with the unfortunate name of Fucking think a place that’s called any other other name would get less offensive treatment. Moves are now afoot to change the village name to something less distinctive. “The only problem is that we need all of the Fucking residents to agree to the name change,” Mayor Franz Meindl said –speaking literally, you can assume, and not colloquially, in a recent TV interview. “Everyone needs to agree for it to happen.”

✪ Penis removal not needed for man to become woman: Ontario tribunal

Under current law, even if a man transitioning to a woman had undergone hormone therapy, grown a pair of breasts and developed a higher-pitched voice, they are barred from changing their sex without written proof of a vagina. “Even though you could be presenting as a female full-time, you couldn’t get your birth certificate changed to show you as female unless you had the male bits lopped off,” said Kay Lockhart, a woman-in-transition based in Ottawa.

“I found 11 films showing my wife in indecent scenes with her lover….it was the first time I watched a porno film and I did this just out of curiosity,” Ramadan told Egyptian newspapers at his house in the northeastern province of Dakhalia. “She first denied it and accused me of being insane before I faced her with the films…she then confessed to be still in love with her boyfriend, saying he is as young as her and that I am an old man.” Ramadan said he had been happy during his marriage life until he logged on to that website. Newspapers did not say whether he decided to divorce her.

Plenty of cop “beat downs” can be found online, but how often does the officer who stops others from handing out the beating get fired for it? That’s exactly what’s happening to Officer Regina Tasca in the Bogota Police Department. Tasca’s dashboard camera captured her as she attempted to stop two officers from beating an emotionally disturbed young man. Just days after the incident, she was told she was being suspended with pay. A year later, her trial is about to begin as the Bogota PD seeks to fire her.

Here’s a simple math equation: T-shirts + abortion = controversy. Tensions ran high on Monday, after T-shirts reading “I had an abortion” were sold on the University of North Carolina Wilmington campus, WECT reports . The shirts were on sale as part of a book signing and discussion lead by abortion rights advocate, Jennifer Baumgardner. The shirts are meant to help destigmatize abortion and help people talk about their experience, according to WWAY. A few students protested the shirts by wearing some of their own that said, “I haven’t killed a baby.”

Students as young as 11 years old would be tested for use of marijuana, pills, cocaine and heroin under a proposal by a North Port charter school that wants to institute the region’s most aggressive student testing program.

“A host of previous studies have routinely shown that individuals with body piercings or tattoos are more likely to engage in risky behavior than non-pierced or non-tattooed people,” corresponding author Nicolas Gueguen, a professor of social behavior at the University of Southern Brittany, said in a journal news release. These risky behaviors include unprotected sex, fighting, theft and drinking. Educators, parents and doctors should consider tattoos and piercings as potential signs of drinking and use them to begin a conversation about alcohol use and other risky behaviors, Gueguen suggested.

Though a variety of companies today serve alcohol to employees, it’s still ad agencies who hold highest the gin-soaked torch. The ranks of liquor-serving firms have recently included J. Walter Thompson, BBDO, TBWA/Chiat/Day, Grey, and Mindshare. In New York, J. Walter Thompson has in its offices a 50-foot-long bar with pedestal stools that would put many a commercial bar to shame. “Yes, we have a bar,” says a spokesperson, “and it is frequently accessed. We think it incentivizes and enthuses employees. It’s generally used for off-hours consumption, but that’s not to say there isn’t on-hours consumption as well.”

Infographic

In the realm of private fantasy, the allure of sexual submission, even in its extremes, is remarkably widespread. An analysis of 20 studies published in Psychology Today estimates that between 31 percent and 57 percent of women entertain fantasies where they are forced to have sex. “Rape fantasies are a place where politics and Eros meet, uneasily,” says Daniel Bergner, who is working on a book on female desire to be published next year. “It is where what we say and what is stand next to each other, mismatched.” The researchers and psychologists he talked to for his 2009 New York Times article, “What Do Women Want?” often seemed reluctant to use the phrase “rape fantasy,” and in scholarly pieces, the idea makes even the chroniclers of these fantasies extremely nervous and apologetic. Even though fantasies are something that, by definition, one can’t control, they seem to be saying something about modern women that nearly everyone wishes wasn’t said.

The former heavyweight champion said that back in 2009 he was in a hotel room with seven prostitutes, a morphine drip in his arm, a pile of cocaine and a bottle of cognac when he began to feel paranoid. Convinced the women were trying to steal from him he started beating them up and threw them out – to stop them from ‘taking his soul’. Tyson said: ‘That’s when I realised it wasn’t just demons – it was the devil himself. ‘It was the lowest point of a very low life, but it was my own knockout punch to clean up life, get whole, get well – and I haven’t done anything in three years now.

The agencies launched an investigation earlier this month when a shipment from Brazil was intercepted at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. The packages, which police report were destined for Richardson’s apartment in Picton, contained drugs known as dimethyltryptamine, a hallucinogen more commonly referred to as DMT, which is a natural compound found in many plants and shrubs. Prince Edward OPP officers assisted with a search warrant at Richardson’s apartment and seized an additional 40 kilograms of the drug. Combined with the packages seized at the airport, police confiscated a total of 120 kgs. Of the illegal drug. This translates to an estimated street value of $68,750 and equals approximately 13,750 hits of the drug, police report.

✪ Tazered man high on LSD dies in police custody, family seeks answers

However, his friend Amanda Nazarao said she and Salgado were on LSD when police responded to a West Miami neighborhood, early Friday morning. Salgado was reportedly naked and behaving in a strange manner. When police arrived at the scene, they Tasered the 21-year-old and restrained him. “They had no reason to beat him, they had no reason to Taser him. He was naked, he had no weapon on him, he wasn’t a threat to them,” Nazarao said. Miami-Dade Police released the following statement: “Upon the officers’ arrival, the male who was later identified as George Salgado became aggressive and violent towards the officers and they utilized their electronic control device.” The 21-year-old was transported to Larkin Hospital, where he later died. Nazarao said, “He looked over. He was like, ‘I just want to tell you guys that I love you all,’ and that’s the last thing he said.”

On a night the team curtailed beer sales in the upper deck, the Blue Jays also ejected a spectator dressed as a marijuana leaf.

When more than 400 25-years-old adults were interviewed, some showed signs of alcohol use problems, but their problems didn’t correlate to self-reported feelings of immaturity. When surveyed again four years later at age 29 and then again at age 35, subjects expressed different sentiments: individuals who showed signs of alcohol abuse or dependence also self-reported feeling immature for their age. “We interpreted our findings to suggest that, at 25, drinking is more culturally acceptable,” Winograd said. “Young adults are out at the bars with their friends and drinking is a bonding experience. They also view blacking out, vomiting and drunk driving as more acceptable because peers are behaving similarly. “But by 29, when many of their peers have settled down, individuals who still drink heavily may start to view themselves as ‘Peter Pans’ of partying, who never fully matured,” Winograd said.

Federal authorities have arrested eight men accused of distributing more than $1 million worth of LSD, ecstasy, and other narcotics with an online storefront that used the TOR anonymity service to mask their Internet addresses. “The Farmer’s Market,” as the online store was called, was like an Amazon for consumers of controlled substances, according to a 66-page indictment unsealed on Monday. It offered online forums, Web-based order forms, customer service, and at least four methods of payment, including PayPal and Western Union. From January 2007 to October 2009, it processed some 5,256 orders valued at $1.04 million. The site catered to about 3,000 customers in 35 countries, including the United States.

D.H. Peligro may hail from the wrong side of the segregated St. Louis tracks but after becoming the drummer of the Dead Kennedys and making his way into the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he has seen much of the world—including the dark side of addiction. Two years after a nasty relapse, Peligro is back with a new band (catch them at the Viper Room this Sunday night). He’s also now ready to tell the world what it’s like to be punk, black, and trying to hide a drug habit from Anthony Kiedis.

A smart-mouthed junkie/loser known as J.J. (George Segal) spends his days looking for just “one more fix”.

The woman was married to defendant Robert McClain, a former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, at the time of the vicious attack, and pretended to castrate her 23-year-old boyfriend as the husband watched, prosecutors previously said. Through tears, the woman told jurors that she pleaded with her jealous husband to stop his violent two-hour rampage in September 2008 for the sake of his career and their children, the Orange County Register reported. McClain didn’t listen, she reportedly testified, and instead beat her boyfriend to the point of brain damage and slashed his body with a knife. The unidentified woman said her enraged hubby tried to have sex with her, ordered her to have sex with the badly injured boyfriend and demanded the castration as a sick form of retribution.

In the UK in the 1960s an attempt was made to reduce fly posting (the illegal pasting up of posters). Warning notices were put up with the legend ‘Bill Stickers Will Be Prosecuted’. Waggish fly posters responded with ‘Bill Stickers is Innocent’ notices. The joke wasn’t new in the 1960s though. In a New York newspaper The Olean Herald, 1884, there’s a piece reprinted from the London Graphic: “A countryman named William Stickers, flying to London to escape from rural justice, was appalled at reading on a wall: ‘Bill Stickers Beware!’ He went a little further, but reading again, ‘Bill Stickers will be punished with the utmost rigour of the law,’ gave himself up for lost and surrendered.”

A five-story-tall cylindrical metal tank, 90 feet in diamater had burst. A two-story-tall wave containing 2.3 million gallons of molasses issued forth, traveling out in all directions like a shock-wave. The molasses spread across the city at an estimated 35 miles per hour. And it wasn’t just the sugary tidal wave that was so deadly; the tank ripped into sharp projectiles, and shot metal bolts from its sides like bullets. As the wave and debris crashed down Commercial Street, buildings were smashed to bits. Some were picked up by their foundations and floated away in the tide of molasses. Electrical poles keeled over, exposing live wires. A steel elevated train support beam was torn to smithereens. Molasses covered everything. According to a Boston Post article, “Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly paper.” It wasn’t just horses. The great Boston molasses flood killed 21 people.

A 10-year-old girl from Colombia gave birth to a baby girl via cesarean section, Univision’s Primer Impacto, reported. The girl hails from an indigenous tribe in the town of Manaure, a town in the Colombian Department of La Guajira.

Reginald Gill, 77, conned women into believing they had cancer and told one victim she could be cured if a man sucked her breasts. Thanks Jasmine

The trio allegedly forged a sect called Cartel who wanted to purify the world and reduce the population according to police spokesman Democrito Honorato, from the Brazilian town of Guaranhuns. They were identified as Jorge Beltrao Negromonte and Elizabeth Pires da Silveira, both 51, and Bruna da Silva. Police allege they intended to kill three women per year. Once at their home, it is thought that the women were killed and their “meat” was cooked and used as the filling in a pastry dish known as empanada, which was then sold to unwitting neighbours.

The Rape-aXe system consists of a latex sheath, which contains razor-sharp barbs. The device is worn in her vagina like a tampon. When the attacker attempts vaginal penetration the barbs attach themselves to the penis, causing great discomfort. The device must be surgically removed, which will result in the positive identification of the attacker and subsequent arrest

A Recording Chronology Of The Early Days Of Psychedelic Culture This is an attempt to chronicle all relevant recording events during the early years in which psychedelic culture and pop/rock culture coalesced. The timeline does not deal with events outside rock music, and contains no entries related to jazz, avantgarde, exotica, etc. It is subjective to a certain degree, and some borderline entries that are not necessarily “psychedelic” have been included just the same. The dates have been verified against quality sources as far as possible. Prior to the 1965-66 era, a selection of important items have been included.

NSFW Ketchup performance art

✪ Slayer Reign in Blood Red Cabernet Sauvignon Vintage: 2010

As much as you love your Hell Awaits and Reign In Blood, you have now found a wine to match the music. Slayer one of the hardest thrash metal bands ever and pioneers in their genre, have chosen Sweden as the launch market for their first beverage, Slayer Reign in Blood Red! The wine, a Cabernet Sauvignon from California, is as uncomprimising and tough as the band. After a couple of Seasons in the Abyss, the wine has an undisputed attitude and a soft nose of dark berry fruits with oak and spicy nuances. Good mouth feel with hints of fresh fruit and juicy, smooth tannins. Well structured and rounded with subtle notes of oak, showing true Divine Intervention. Best company for the wine comes as no surprise, enjoy it while headbanging, riffing or with food, friends and great music. Reign in Wine!

“And then there were Bovver-inspired bands like Hector, who went so far as to dress like Dennis the Menace, paint freckles on their faces and stick catapaults in their back pockets. When that failed to attract the right kind of attention, an image change involving velvet hastened their demise. But they did leave us with one gem: the proto-punk Bovver thrash of Wired Up, a brilliant three minutes of teenage rock that embodies the spirit of snotty youth.”

A trend among some students to crush certain candy and snort or inhale it — dubbed “Smoking Smarties” — is causing concern among some drug educators. “It is not a narcotic of any sort. They are not getting high,” said Carol Williams, project coordinator of the Shelby County Drug Free Coalition Project Safe Place Programs of Family Connection, Inc. “They are literally just inhaling sugar into their body.” The students, often middle schoolers, crush candies such as Smarties or use already powdered candies such as Pixy Stix or powder drink packets such as KoolAid and snort them into their noses, Williams said. In some cases the students will crush a pack of candy and put the packet in their mouth and inhale and blow the fine granules out as if they were smoking. she said.

The accounts give a rare glimpse into how some NATO personnel and contractors seem to have gotten ensnared in Afghanistan’s multibillion-dollar narco economy, which supplies 90 percent of the world’s opium, the raw ingredient of heroin. Canada and other NATO powers have long been accused of turning a blind eye to a 15-fold increase in Afghan opium production since 2001 (according to UN figures) and cozying up to Afghan warlords and officials reputed to be involved with drugs. But these new accounts suggest NATO’s presence helps fuel the gigantic Afghan drug trade. The accounts are reminiscent of the Vietnam War, when U.S. forces befriended opium-dealing warlords in Southeast Asia and many U.S. soldiers became addicted to heroin, with some smuggling it back home.

Traditionally, the bulls were painted by the Hani people of China in the belief that the practice would protect their village, mainly by preventing tigers from wandering into their homes. Of course, the threat of tigers and other man-eaters has reduced drastically in modern times, but the festival continues to be celebrated with much enthusiasm. The China-Laos-Vietnam Bull Painting Festival, as it is called, had 48 participating teams this year. The paraded bulls were hardly recognizable, covered in colors like bright blue, gold, yellow and red. But the paintings were far from abstract. The bulls served as a canvas for some real artistic talent, landscapes, portraits, and intricate patterns adorned their otherwise brown or white skin. Even the horns were covered with paint.

Some veterinarians in Durango have seen a spike in the number of dogs poisoned by marijuana since the proliferation of medical marijuana dispensaries made the drug more accessible. “We used to see maybe one case a year,” said Stacee Santi, a veterinarian at Riverview Animal Hospital. “Now we’re seeing a couple a month.” Dogs can be exposed to marijuana through smoke or eating cannabis-laced foodstuffs. Recently, a large-breed dog was brought to the hospital stumbling, dribbling urine and exhibiting the classic symptoms of dilated eyes and slow heart beat, Santi said. “We induced vomiting, and up came a 3-by-3-foot piece of cheesecloth,” Santi said. “The cheesecloth could have been used to strain marijuana butter.” The butter, once infused with cannabis, can be used to make baked goods such as brownies.

Mr Knox-Hewson renamed himself Emperor Spiderman Gandalf Wolverine Skywalker Optimus Prime Goku Sonic Xavier Ryu Cloud Superman Heman Batman Thrash. Mr Borbidge now goes by Baron Venom Balrog Sabretooth Vader Megatron Vegeta Robotnik Magneto Bison Sephiroth Lex Luthor Skeletor Joker Grind. “We decided to change our names because we were bored of our day-to-day lives and wanted to do something that reflected our true personalities,” Emperor Thrash said. “We couldn’t believe how easy it was to do – we just had to fill in a few forms and we were granted superhero status.” Baron Grind said he was looking forward to seeing his new name on his bank card. “I wonder how they will fit it all on?” he said. Meet some more of the people who’ve given themselves crazy names – including Lianne Madonna Vogue On The Cover Of A Magazine McHale Dawson, her twin sister Emma Madonna Confessions On A Dance Floor McHale Dawson and their best friend Gemma True Blue Strike A Pose Carroll McHale Dawson Me

In a nod to traditional belief, the sparkling lavatory was created to please the “god of lavatories,” said Kazuo Sumimiya, director of the showroom for the Lixil interior fixture company of which INAX is a part. “In Japan, we believe a deity exists in the lavatory. That’s why keeping lavatories clean and taking good care of it have been a Japanese custom since long ago,” he added. “If we were to sell it, it would probably be worth around 10 million yen ($130,000).”

Christ first visited Japan between the ages of 21 and 33 (the Bible does in fact skip over large periods of Christ’s early life, and many theories exist about what he did in the intervals). The document claims he studied the native language and culture before returning to Jerusalem, where he was crucified. Only it wasn’t really him who was crucified. His younger brother, Isukiri (who makes no appearance in the Bible), nobly took his place on the cross, pretending to be the Son of God, while the real Christ fled to Siberia. A few years later, via Alaska, he arrived at the port of Hachinohe, just 40 km from Shingo. He made his way to the village, where he married, had three children, and lived to the age of 106.

✰ South Dakota bar owner charged with raping 3 underage girls

The shots of alcohol and mixed drinks began flowing in the early morning hours. Three friends — two 14-year-olds and a 12-year-old — were supposed to be babysitting over a Saturday night. Instead, police say, they met up with a bar owner, who drove them to his closed tavern and began pouring them drinks — vodka shots, orange juice and vodka, vodka and coke and energy drinks. Two of the girls say they got sick, and all three say they either passed out or fell asleep at the bar. That’s when, according to prosecutors, 34-year-old Werner Fajardo raped each of them. Fajardo, who owns and operates a bar in the South Dakota city of Huron, was charged with six counts of rape and three counts of giving alcohol to minors. He was released after posting a $10,000 cash bond.

The message I get is that Americans love the movies as much as ever. It’s the theaters that are losing their charm. Proof: theaters thrive that police their audiences, show a variety of titles and emphasize value-added features. The rest of the industry can’t depend forever on blockbusters to bail it out.

An unusual nativity display at a Claremont church that portrayed gay couples was vandalized over the weekend in an incident authorities are investigating as a hate crime. Claremont United Methodist Church has a Christmas tradition of unusual nativity displays, intended to carry a social or political message. Despite some of the controversial topics, the scenes had never been vandalized or defaced, according to church officials and John Zachary, the artist who created the scenes. But this year, suspects vandalized a nativity scene that included wooden light boxes with three couples holding hands — a man and a woman, two women and two men — under a star of Bethlehem and a sign that said “Christ is Born.” Church officials came in before the Christmas morning service to find that someone had pushed over the two gay couples and left the heterosexual couple standing.

One of the nation’s most widely planted crops — a genetically engineered corn plant that makes its own insecticide — may be losing its effectiveness because a major pest appears to be developing resistance more quickly than scientists expected. The U.S. food supply is not in any immediate danger because the problem remains isolated. But scientists fear potentially risky farming practices could be blunting the hybrid’s sophisticated weaponry.

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

What’s happening to America’s vaginas? Is pubic hair going extinct? In a word, no. But it’s on the fast track to the endangered species list, and its chief predators include the porn industry, smaller bathing suits and lingerie bottoms, and the Kardashian sisters (case in point: Kim once famously proclaimed that women “shouldn’t have hair anywhere but their heads”). Pubic hair is, however, evolving. Once upon a time, all vulvas were coated in a protective layer of coarse, woolly tresses. Hard to believe, right? It’s kind of like the revelation that horses once had toes, or that the Ford Mustang once had tailfins. But like any evolving species, the vulva has morphed into something sleeker, starker, and altogether more modern. Today, it is smooth, baby-soft, and hairless.

The Atlantic reported this month that female pubic hair in America is on the road to extinction, but that’s a bit like noting the spotted owl is an endangered species. Grooming and waxing experts say the latest trend in pubic hair removal isn’t targeted at women—it’s for the guys. There’s evidence of this all around us (if you dare to look). The most startling aspect of seeing Anthony Weiner’s penis in a leaked iPhone sext earlier this year wasn’t its size, but that it looked like a plucked chicken. The same is true of other celebrities’ trimmed full-monty shots, from football player Brett Favre to Fall Out Boy Pete Wentz.

This blogger we all know got a pic of himself flipping off a camera removed from Google+ yesterday, and another blogger blogged about it, and then the original blogger blogged about that blogger. Here’s why the image removal was significant, via BoingBoing’s Rob Beschizza. “But Google describes Plus as “sharing in real life”. It describes it as an “identity service”. The middle finger, pointed at no-one in particular, is hardly a scandalous gesture; here it triggers a vaguely-defined policy that’s being applied to a service marketed heavily as a public venue for free expression.”

✰ Diseased seals in Alaska tested for radiation

Scientists in Alaska are investigating whether local seals are being sickened by radiation from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Scores of ring seals have washed up on Alaska’s Arctic coastline since July, suffering or killed by a mysterious disease marked by bleeding lesions on the hind flippers, irritated skin around the nose and eyes and patchy hair loss on the animals’ fur coats. Biologists at first thought the seals were suffering from a virus, but they have so far been unable to identify one, and tests are now underway to find out if radiation is a factor.

In 2011, we watched as tech villains found creative new ways to violate our privacy. They misappropriated our social networking profiles, stalked us through our phones, and plucked secrets from our wifi networks. To help you better prepare for 2012’s inevitable privacy attacks, we enumerate below the most worrisome threats you should monitor in the coming year.

The annual cleaning of one of Christianity’s holiest churches deteriorated into a brawl between rival clergy Wednesday, as dozens of monks feuding over sacred space at the Church of the Nativity battled each other with brooms until police intervened. The ancient church, built over the traditional site of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, is shared by three Christian denominations – Roman Catholics, Armenians and Greek Orthodox. Wednesday’s fight erupted between Greek and Armenian clergy, with both sides accusing each other of encroaching on parts of the church to which they lay claim.

The number of sexual assaults reported at the country’s prestigious military academies rose sharply for the second year in a row, according to a Pentagon report issued Tuesday.

As cars and trucks have become laden with brainy devices to control everything from air bags to crash-avoidance systems, the vehicles have become increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks, according to recent studies by university researchers and security companies. One found that a car’s computer controls could be remotely accessed through its Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or OnStar connections, potentially allowing terrorists to control the brakes of numerous cars simultaneously, corporate spies to eavesdrop on a motoring executive’s phone calls, or thieves to electronically locate, break into and start cars they’ve targeted to steal. Another showed how a car’s tire pressure warning system could be wirelessly tricked into sending false alerts to drivers, which could prompt them to stop and fall prey to robbers following them.

A Shell deepwater drilling site off the Nigerian coast that the company reported leaking on Wednesday may have spilled up to 2.4 million gallons, according to nonprofit environmental satellite monitoring group SkyTruth. If so, that’s far worse than indicated in statements made so far by Royal Dutch Shell, which has put the amount of oil leaked at the Bonga offshore site at “less than 40,000 barrels,” (1.7 million gallons).

ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire to the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium, hoping to touch an alternate reality. I came to meet Athena, the aquarium’s forty-pound, five-foot-long, two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus. For me, it was a momentous occasion. I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent.

Opponents of the Stop Online Piracy Act won an important, but temporary, victory this month when the House Judiciary Committee hit the pause button on the disastrous legislation. Despite this, as Nancy Scola details, the fight is far from over and SOPA is still favored to pass. One major tactic that might truly derail the bill would be if the biggest websites in the country were to temporarily shut down their services and instead inform visitors of the dangers of SOPA. Remarkably, it now appears as though a coalition made up of fifteen online titans is seriously considering doing exactly that

The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in “psychological operations” to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators.

Pictures have emerged providing the shocking proof that U.S. government doctors once experimented on disabled American citizens and prison inmates.

Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.

Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission.

☆ RAPTOR RAPE REVERSAL

The thought alone was glorious, and a toothy grin spread across Raaazerchakz’s evil face, his snakelike eyes narrowed as he charged at Bill, entering him bone dry. The intertwined lizard lovers smashed into a nearby kitchen worktop, and Raaazerchakz started to go to work on Bill, who screeched his disapproval and started thrashing his tail wildly. Pots and pans clanged loudly as they were hurled off the half destroyed kitchen unit by the bumming beasts, flying silver tributes to their wrong love. Frantically pumping, Raaazerchakz used his right claw to hook into the tail, preventing it from knocking him. With his other claw, Raaazerchakz started to lightly puncture Bill’s back in various places, giving him a brutal backscuttler. This was something he had heard about back when he was in his pen, separated from a jumping escape by two layers of razor wire mesh netting, inter and outer.

“[Diddy] went through Kim Porter and Rodney King and knocked down the WTC and then they all came and knocked my children down… He date raped me 24 years ago and knocked me down him and Kim Porter and Wallace Wright, then Sean Combs and Kim and Wallace Wright came back 18 years later and raped and sexually abused my children and knocked my children down and crushed me and my children daily.”

The shooting prompted the largest area lock-down in history. Hundreds of officers from local, state and federal agencies vainly combed a seven-mile area looking for an armed gunman in his 40s with a long, gray pony tail. Helicopters, SWAT teams and K9 units were deployed.

Children from nine schools remained locked in their classrooms for seven hours, unable to get access to restrooms or food out of fears that the suspect would enter a campus and create a hostage situation.

In the cases announced Tuesday, officials said the alleged straw buyers managed to acquire the weapons — and pass federal background checks — without raising red flags despite the fact that in some cases they plunked down large sums of cash for multiple purchases of assault rifles. In one case, officials said, seven individuals spent $104,251 in cash at various Phoenix-area firearms dealers to acquire 140 firearms.

The FBI yesterday executed 40 search warrants around the US to gather evidence on the Anonymous distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in defense of WikiLeaks last year—attacks which targeted Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Amazon. And when the FBI comes a-knockin’, the whole house starts a rockin’.

Ars has seen posts from a private forum in which several targets of the FBI raids offer brief descriptions of the experience, along with the occasional photo of a beaten-in front door. We cannot guarantee the authenticity of these accounts, though we believe them to be genuine.

A few young Germans have the world’s biggest record companies at their knees. After hacking into the computers of famous recording artists and their managers, they have placed unreleased songs by the likes of Lady Gaga and Shakira on the Internet. Two have been caught, but the others are still at work.

A 13-year-old Norwegian boy avoided being attacked by wolves by playing a heavy metal song on his mobile phone, the Zvuki.ru music web portal reported on Thursday.

The incident took place in the central Norwegian municipality of Rakkestad. Four wolves, who appeared before the boy when he was returning home from school, were scared away by the noise coming from the boy’s mobile phone, the Russian website said.

The song that saved the boy’s life was by thrash metal band Megadeth.

Flame On!

In October, the Chicago Police Department’s new crime-forecasting unit was analyzing 911 calls for service and produced an intelligence report predicting a shooting would happen soon on a particular block on the South Side.

Three minutes later, it did, police officials say.

That got police Supt. Jody Weis thinking.

He wondered if the department could produce intelligence reports even quicker. Next time, officers might have an hour’s notice before a shooting — instead of just a few minutes.

The solution: Weis is now consolidating the department’s various intelligence-gathering units under his direct command to improve the flow of information.

When the man walked out of the Capital One bank branch in a Washington suburb, he was holding a gun to the bank teller’s head and was using her as a shield. The suspect also had a fake bomb taped to his body, police said.
Officers were already outside the bank as the suspect walked out, and the confrontation unfolded on television with a helicopter camera hovering overhead.

Video shows him backing away from police with the woman when the suspect tripped over a pile of snow from Wednesday’s storm. The woman ran away from the suspect toward police and held her hands up to cover her ears.

✰ Google Comes Under Fire for ‘Secret’ Relationship with NSA

In a letter sent Monday, Consumer Watchdog asked Representative Darrell Issa, the new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, to investigate the relationship between Google and several government agencies.

The group asked Issa to investigate contracts at several U.S. agencies for Google technology and services, the “secretive” relationship between Google and the U.S. National Security Agency, and the company’s use of a U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration airfield in California.

Federal agencies have also taken “insufficient” action in response to revelations last year that Google Street View cars were collecting data from open Wi-Fi connections they passed, Consumer Watchdog said in the letter.

What institutions can you trust these days with your donations? The Associated Press reported today that the $21.7 billion Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is a fraud where at least two-thirds of the funds were “pocketed,” and donated medicines were sold on the black market for profit.

The prestigious development fund is backed by celebrities like Bono, politicians like French president Sarkozy, and a cool $150 million from Bill and Melinda Gates. The AP wrote, “The fund has been a darling of the power set that will hold the World Economic Forum in the Swiss mountain village of Davos this week.”

The 2008 financial crisis was an “avoidable” disaster caused by widespread failures in government regulation, corporate mismanagement and heedless risk-taking by Wall Street, according to the conclusions of a federal inquiry.
The commission that investigated the crisis casts a wide net of blame, faulting two administrations, the Federal Reserve and other regulators for permitting a calamitous concoction: shoddy mortgage lending, the excessive packaging and sale of loans to investors and risky bets on securities backed by the loans.

An outstanding discussion, primer and visual lesson on toxic assets, failed banks, the Federal Reserve, HR 1207, auditing the Fed, and the cost to taxpayers.

Very interesting story, and not without ramifications for other states.

Walter Keane poses for a portrait at his office. Keane filed and recently won a lawsuit that resulted in several homeowners in Utah getting title to their property, even if they owed the full mortgage, all because of chaos introduced into the nation’s property recording system by MERS.

The attorney for another man in Draper, Utah, says he has won two other cases this way, and another attorney in Utah got a default judgment giving title to borrowers who owed $417,000 on a home.

Utah Professor Chris Peterson weighs in on the significance of the rulings.

Protests inspired by the revolt in Tunisia have dominoed along Egypt, Yemen and Algeria. Some have drawn comparisons to the colour revolutions seen in post-Soviet countries. To discuss this RT talks to William Engdahl – author of the book ‘Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the new world order.’

The American Embassy in Cairo helped a young dissident attend a US-sponsored summit for activists in New York, while working to keep his identity secret from Egyptian state police.

On his return to Cairo in December 2008, the activist told US diplomats that an alliance of opposition groups had drawn up a plan to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak and install a democratic government in 2011.

Assuming someone in high places has an Internet kill switch, shutting down just the international connections would require a lot of manual work, or the preexistence of an infrastructure that can make this happen automatically through management protocols. Of course such a system would never be triggered by accident or by a disgruntled employee.

The old story that the Internet was built as a military network to withstand nuclear attacks is pretty much an urban legend, but despite that, it’s surprisingly hard to kill. It can be done, however, if you’re a government and you try really, really hard.

Says Crowley: “We respect what Egypt contributes to the region, it is a stabilizing force, it has made its own peace with Israel, and is pursuing normal relations with Israel, we think that’s important, we think that’s a model that the region should adopt broadly speaking. at the same time, we recognize that Egypt, Tunisia other countries do need to reform, they do need to respond to the needs of their people, and we encourage that reform and are contributing across the region to that reform.”

Rattansi: [paraphrased] but if Egypt can’t guarantee stability, what’s the point of all your financial support.

Crowley: “We rely on Egypt as an ally to be a stabilizing force in the region… that has benefits across the region.”

Rattansi: “Democracy would be destabilizing to the region generally, wouldn’t it?”

For the first time in human history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive… The resulting global political activism is generating a surge in the quest for personal dignity, cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world painfully scarred by memories of centuries-long alien colonial or imperial domination… The worldwide yearning for human dignity is the central challenge inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening… That awakening is socially massive and politically radicalizing… The nearly universal access to radio, television and increasingly the Internet is creating a community of shared perceptions and envy that can be galvanized and channeled by demagogic political or religious passions. These energies transcend sovereign borders and pose a challenge both to existing states as well as to the existing global hierarchy, on top of which America still perches…

You’ve seen them.Perhaps left in a phone booth, Laundromat, or other public place. Maybe a Fundamentalist coworker or a street evangelist gave one to you. Perhaps a child gave one to your child at school. They have titles such as Are Roman Catholics Christian?, The Death Cookie, and Why Is Mary Crying? They are Chick tracts—tiny cartoon booklets produced by Jack T. Chick (“J.T.C.”) and his publishing house, Chick Publications.

You’ve seen them . . . but have you read one? Do so, and you step into the nightmarish world of Jack T. Chick.